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xen: tmem: self-ballooning and frontswap-selfshrinking
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This patch introduces two in-kernel drivers for Xen transcendent memory
("tmem") functionality that complement cleancache and frontswap.  Both
use control theory to dynamically adjust and optimize memory utilization.
Selfballooning controls the in-kernel Xen balloon driver, targeting a goal
value (vm_committed_as), thus pushing less frequently used clean
page cache pages (through the cleancache code) into Xen tmem where
Xen can balance needs across all VMs residing on the physical machine.
Frontswap-selfshrinking controls the number of pages in frontswap,
driving it towards zero (effectively doing a partial swapoff) when
in-kernel memory pressure subsides, freeing up RAM for other VMs.

More detail is provided in the header comment of xen-selfballooning.c.

Signed-off-by: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>

[v8: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: set default enablement depending on frontswap]
[v7: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: fix capitalization and punctuation in comments]
[v6: fix frontswap-selfshrinking initialization]
[v6: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: fix init pr_infos; add comments about swap]
[v5: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: add NULL to attr list; move inits up to decls]
[v4: dkiper@net-space.pl: use strict_strtoul plus a few syntactic nits]
[v3: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: fix potential divides-by-zero]
[v3: konrad.wilk@oracle.com: add many more comments, fix nits]
[v2: rebased to linux-3.0-rc1]
[v2: Ian.Campbell@citrix.com: reorganize as new file (xen-selfballoon.c)]
[v2: dkiper@net-space.pl: proper access to vm_committed_as]
[v2: dkiper@net-space.pl: accounting fixes]
Cc: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@novell.com>
Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Cc: <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
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Dan Magenheimer committed Jul 8, 2011
1 parent 55922c9 commit a50777c
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17 changes: 17 additions & 0 deletions drivers/xen/Kconfig
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -9,6 +9,23 @@ config XEN_BALLOON
the system to expand the domain's memory allocation, or alternatively
return unneeded memory to the system.

config XEN_SELFBALLOONING
bool "Dynamically self-balloon kernel memory to target"
depends on XEN && XEN_BALLOON && CLEANCACHE && SWAP
default n
help
Self-ballooning dynamically balloons available kernel memory driven
by the current usage of anonymous memory ("committed AS") and
controlled by various sysfs-settable parameters. Configuring
FRONTSWAP is highly recommended; if it is not configured, self-
ballooning is disabled by default but can be enabled with the
'selfballooning' kernel boot parameter. If FRONTSWAP is configured,
frontswap-selfshrinking is enabled by default but can be disabled
with the 'noselfshrink' kernel boot parameter; and self-ballooning
is enabled by default but can be disabled with the 'noselfballooning'
kernel boot parameter. Note that systems without a sufficiently
large swap device should not enable self-ballooning.

config XEN_SCRUB_PAGES
bool "Scrub pages before returning them to system"
depends on XEN_BALLOON
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1 change: 1 addition & 0 deletions drivers/xen/Makefile
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -9,6 +9,7 @@ obj-$(CONFIG_BLOCK) += biomerge.o
obj-$(CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU) += cpu_hotplug.o
obj-$(CONFIG_XEN_XENCOMM) += xencomm.o
obj-$(CONFIG_XEN_BALLOON) += xen-balloon.o
obj-$(CONFIG_XEN_SELFBALLOONING) += xen-selfballoon.o
obj-$(CONFIG_XEN_DEV_EVTCHN) += xen-evtchn.o
obj-$(CONFIG_XEN_GNTDEV) += xen-gntdev.o
obj-$(CONFIG_XEN_GRANT_DEV_ALLOC) += xen-gntalloc.o
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2 changes: 2 additions & 0 deletions drivers/xen/xen-balloon.c
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -98,6 +98,8 @@ static int __init balloon_init(void)

register_balloon(&balloon_sysdev);

register_xen_selfballooning(&balloon_sysdev);

target_watch.callback = watch_target;
xenstore_notifier.notifier_call = balloon_init_watcher;

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